John Baldessari
National City, California (USA), 1931

Ever since he burned his pictorial works in the late seventies in a ritual act of renouncement of the formalism and self-expression that had characterised the post-war period, especially abstract expressionism, John Baldessari’s name has been associated with conceptual art. From that moment on, he became interested in the interconnections between images, always photography, and words. His first works along these lines were Pure Beauty (1966-1968) and An Artist (1966-1968), an allegorical series of casual photographs upon which he wrote texts related to art history. He later abandoned strictly conceptual presuppositions and devoted himself entirely to imagery. His interest in television and cinema imagery converted him into one of the pioneers of ‘image appropriation’. One of his first series and among the most renowned was The violent space (1975-1976), which he produced by deploying still photos of film scenes, using them in his eagerness not to create anything artistic. He worked with them compiling a sort of image dictionary, or rather, a language with which to make phrases and paragraphs, giving rise to this series produced with all the violent images he was able to rescue from film stills. This type of material was one of Baldessari’s favourites, and he used it frequently in his works until the decade of the nineties. Another of Baldessari’s paradigmatic works is the video Folding Hat (1970). The tape shows a half-an-hour sequence, a close-up of the artist holding a hat that he squeezes and flattens as if it were a toy. Although at first glance it may not seem so, this is a work intrinsically linked to the medium of video, for these actions are developed through the interaction of the artist and the camera. When Baldessari began using television and video images, he clearly contributed to breaking down the distinctions between high and low culture. His interest in having his works reach a non-specialised audience led him to create pieces such as Stream of violence: From Front to Torrent (The beginnings) (1966). Consisting of five large-scale panels with black-and-white photographs superimposed with a silk-screened red band and hung on the façade of a building in Los Angeles. The post-modern and didactic characteristics inundating many of his works are clearly exemplified in the Goya Series (1997), in which he repeated the structure of mythic works from art history with his well-known black-and-white cuttings. His works can be found in the world’s finest museums and they have been very influential for succeeding generations of artists, such as the neo-conceptualists of the eighties and other ‘appropriationists’. His labour as professor, begun in the seventies and continuing at present, has been very important and widely recognised by critics and students alike, the latter of which he had write one hundred times over, “I will not make any more boring art, I will not make any more boring art…” C. D.

Blasted Allegories (Colorful Equation/Sentence):
Stage Line; Semi-Colon Shelf Life-Evaluative, 1978
Blasted Allegories (B.W.Sentence): Fondle Facts, 1978

With this piece, John Baldessari was questioning the traditional sense of the allegory, presenting photographic montages that, given their ambivalence, acquire several meanings.
This series, produced in 1978, departs from a phrase by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, “Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning or, at least, thought I had.”
With the “blasted allegories”, symbolic representations of abstract ideas, employed over and over again in all artistic manifestations, Baldessari questioned the meaning of images and what they represent.
The Blasted Allegories consist of a set of photographs taken directly from a television screen over a ten-minute period. Afterwards, the author wrote a word on top of them, the first word that came to mind when he saw each image. Later, without any apparent order, they were stuck on a piece of cardboard upon which the complete title of the work was written. The result is a montage of disjunctive images, mostly fragments taken out of their context and introduced into another at random.
How should these Blasted Allegories be read? From left to right? From top to bottom? These questions arise from the bewilderment they cause. Baldessari thus demonstrates that the reading of a work of art, of an image, cannot and should not be closed. He achieved this with this radical discursive model, construed through the direction the reading is done. Since there are many possible directions, the meanings change, converting each montage into an open piece. The way to approach these works is to scrutinise each one of the apparently unconnected photographs, and drift endlessly while fleeing from coming to any conclusions.
The meanings change depending on the direction and the direction varies with each spectator. There are multiple readings, each image-text may occupy a place and the final meaning of the set depends on the connections established between them. All the images belong to a story and a set, individually they would lose part of their meaning. Baldessari’s montages are in many aspects a place for experimentation, an improbable meeting point for subjects that would otherwise not come into contact and who exist as such by their inclusion therein. As opposed to what happens with a text where all the terms are defined and where the allegory can be decoded, this set of images functions as an unlimited text, where each sign could occupy different places within the syntax, offering an unlimited number of stories. The Blasted Allegories do not have a single solution or a correct interpretation, since they are full of slippery meanings. C. D.

Man Fallen in S-Curve
(with Man looking down and Man looking up), 1984

This black-and-white diptych clearly illustrates John Baldessari’s concerns: exploring the connections between images and words.
To produce it, he appropriated images to which he usually added a word or text, normally in a descriptive way, utilizing the logic of the association of ideas, thus conditioning the spectator upon his/her perception of the image. As occurs in these photographs, in which a man dressed in black and lying down on the floor with his arms stretched apart, can be converted, once the title is read, into an anthropomorphic representation of the letter S.
Baldessari himself explained his procedure when establishing a connection between images and words, “I don’t make much of a distinction between words and images. I have made a lot of work where the camera took pictures every x minutes and later, to escape my own sensitivity, I had my assistant look at the photos and think of a substitute word. In short, if there was a plane, she would write plane on the back, or fly or escape. I organized those words in alphabetical order, according to the words, not the images. Afterwards, I composed a kind of narrative with words. I’d look through the files for the word I wanted, turn it over and use the image”. Another way of working with images taken from film, was to group them together according to similarities, in other words, those portraying cowboys, falling people, people looking at each other…. creating an image dictionary that functions syntactically like words, and that are prepared to be joined with one another to suggest stories.
Black-and-white photographs are very representative of this decade of the eighties. In them, the subjects’ heads were cut out in a circle, where a brushstroke of acrylic paint was added, as in Bloody Sundae (1987) or Cruelty and Cowardice (With Malice) (1988).
He bases his theoretical premises on the text “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” by Sol LeWitt from 1967, where the supremacy of the idea over the materialisation of the work of art is proclaimed, in an effort to address the spectator’s mind rather than his glance. This anti-object attitude with which he attempted to flee from beauty was not merely reinforced through his works, full of ambiguous metaphors and elaborated semantic relationships, but also by way of his ingenuity and his intelligence, for he is considered to be one of the maximum representatives of visual art. C. D.